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By Ken Epstein
Residents of Sojourner Truth Manor in North Oakland, a housing complex for seniors founded by local civil rights and community leaders almost 50 years ago, are involved in a fight for dignity and decent living conditions with HumanGood, a nonprofit company that manages senior housing in Oakland and across the country.
Tenants interviewed by the Oakland Post said that they are kept in the dark about what the management is planning or what repairs are underway. They say management often does not respond to their complaints and concerns about needed repairs such as broken fixtures, flooding, and lack of heat or hot water in individual apartments, vermin, broken security cameras, televisions and building elevators, while the complex’s community room has been out of operation for 11 years.
More general concerns are the lack of a social service coordinator, a position that in the past offered community-building activities and provided information and support for residents. Tenants are also concerned about the failure to provide translation for tenants who are not English-speaking, including those who are Ethiopian, Eritrean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Arabic-speaking.
Beverly Colston, an eight-year tenant at Sojourner Truth Manor, serves as chairperson of the tenant association. Photo by Ken Epstein.
“They’re not treating us seniors like we’re human beings; since this management company has been here, there is no communication whatsoever,” said Beverley Colston, who has lived at Sojourner Truth for eight years and serves as the chairperson of the tenant association.
Underscoring the lack of transparency, 14-year-resident Nancy Delaney said, “Management is treating us like we’re livestock; they feel they don’t have to give us common courtesy, even to tell us what they’re doing.”
Sojourner Truth, located at 6015 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland, consists of three buildings with 74 studios and 13 one-bedroom apartments.
In the past few years, there has been turn-over of management companies that operate and maintain the complex. Since mid-2022, Sojourner Truth has been managed by HumanGood, the largest nonprofit provider of senior housing and services in California and among the 10 largest organizations of its kind in the nation, according to reports on the internet.
In Oakland, besides Sojourner Truth, HumanGood operates at Piedmont Gardens, Allen Temple’s senior residences, JL Richard Terrace and Irene Cooper Terrace.
Overall, the company has over 5,000 employees and serves over 14,000 residents in seven states.
Annual reports on the nonprofit senior living market sector are produced by LeadingEdge Ziegler 200. Ziegler is described on its website, as a “privately held investment bank, capital markets and proprietary investments firm and the nation’s leading underwriters of financings for not-for-profit senior living providers.”
While the lack of repairs is a serious concern for many tenants, the most pressing need at Sojourner Truth, said Colston, is to hire a full-time social services coordinator, a social worker “who would serve as an advocate for tenants with management and help with recertification for food stamps, health services and all the other forms we have to submit on a yearly basis.”
“We have too many people who speak too many different languages, and we get written notices in English,” she said. “They don’t communicate with us except by letters, and we often don’t understand them.”
The tenants need someone who can patiently and respectfully explain these notices, Colson said. In the past, the social services coordinator also organized bingo, exercise sessions, dominos, activities and celebrations of holidays and birthdays, she said.
In fairness, Colston said, the deterioration of physical conditions at Sojourner Truth did not begin with HumanGood but with the previous manager, Christian Church Homes. HumanGood is responsible for not communicating. “With these people here, there is no communication whatsoever,” she said.
By the Oakland Post’s deadline, HumanGood had not replied to email questions. Calls to the office of Sojourner Truth were not picked up.
Tenants at Sojourner Truth have been meeting with residents of Harriet Tubman Terrace apartments in Berkeley who are also pushing for improved conditions.
